Not long ago at UN COP26 , representatives of more than a hundred countries adopted Global Methane Pledge wherein everyone agreed to reduce methane emissions up to 30 per cent by 2030, as compared to its 2020 levels.
The Russia-India-China trio refrained from signing the memorandum.
However, an international study by the researchers hailing from Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) and CEA, has uncovered hundreds of major methane leaks which can be directly linked to the indiscriminate continued exploitation of oil and gas worldwide.
However, there is something peaky about it: Billions of dollars can be saved for the hydrocarbon producing countries in the form of ecological as well as economic benefits.
This includes social costs pertaining to climate change and other costs involving degraded air quality and the monetary value of lost Methane.
The study, published in Science, mapped around 1,800 plumes of Methane around the globe for continuous two years. Out of these nearly 1,200 existed because of fossil-fuel extraction.
However it is to note that this is just minimum estimation because satellites are made to only routinely spot the biggest plumes (>25 tons per hour of CH4) and are anticipated to be just 10% of the sectoral emissions.
Also, the methane releases around these oil processing units were massive enough to be consistently recorded, i.e., these emissions are not random and chaotic, but rather streamlined.
Why is Methane produced in Oil Industry?
Methane (CH4), a gas with an approximately 30 times higher potency to warm Earth for next 100 years than that of CO2 and a major contributor to climate change gets produced from oil, coal and natural gas industry when natural gas is flared or vented.
But mostly it gets unintentionally released in small forms, from valves, maintenance operations, equipment used in drilling or production and are termed fugitive emissions.
Underestimating the global Methane emissions:
A study undertaken in 2018 had suggested that the industry proponents and policy makers continued to underestimate the share of Methane coming from oil and gas industry.
It accounts for one quarter of the global anthropogenic Methane emissions.
And as per Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), this industry alone emits around eight million metric tons of methane annually, that can be equated to impact of 20 million vehicles running on the road for at least a year.
This is also indicative of something strikingly deceptive.
That the dirty fuel industry and allied businesses are only up to “green washing” instead of changing the reality in depth.
A similar conclusion has been drawn from research that claims that businesses are only fulfilling 40% of their highly claimed goals and the cumulative efforts of top 25 companies will even make meagre impact.
Framer of the report explained: “It is not clear these reductions take us beyond business as usual. We were very disappointed and surprised at how much room for improvement there was [among the companies studied]. Companies need to be much more transparent about these goals.”
Even many of the offsetting projects set up worldwide, are found to have low credibility and doubtful value.
All this necessitates a reliable, efficient and extremely sensitive atmospheric monitoring system that can intrinsically track emissions so that abatement measures can be ascertained and devised accordingly.